It’s the holiday season and your customers just want what’s promised - an enjoyable customer experience.

That means:

No servers crashing

No buggy applications

No error messages

No unresponsive web pages

The hustle and bustle of the holiday shopping extravaganza is bound to catch some businesses by surprise, but that doesn't have to be you. The National Retail Federation projects that Americans will spend more than $600 billion during the holiday season. And I’m sure your business wants to capture as much of that as possible.

Are you ready for the onslaught of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and beyond?

At TeamQuest, we suggest a basic five-step process that can help you make Black Friday bright and for that matter, ensure your 2015 doesn't go dark. It’s called IT Service Optimization and its built around:

Understand business objectives

Prioritize services and assessing risk levels

Establish service levels

Plan and provisioning services

Manage service performance

The first step in creating a service is to fully understand the business requirements. What it is that the business is trying to accomplish? To answer that, IT professionals require a business perspective and knowledge of the strategic goals of the organization. Sometimes those goals have yet to be documented, making the job more difficult, but no less necessary. Understanding the priority of business goals enables IT to align with those priorities and determine where time and resources are best focused.

Taking into account the business goals of the organization, it is important to review processes to be sure that they accomplish meaningful work in a sensible and efficient manner. Conduct this analysis before automating a process. In other words, it does no good to automate an inefficient process. For example, a major computer vendor implemented a Sales Force Automation (SFA) system1, but after spending $8 million on implementation, the company saw a decline in sales. Turns out they had automated a bad process and were making mistakes more efficiently.

We’ll spend the next couple of weeks outlining the ITSO steps in separate blog posts so stay tuned.